Hamish Champ: Lord Bell didn't strike the right note

I was looking forward to hearing what advice Tim Bell had to offer the pub trade when he addressed last week's ALMR 'Business Day' conference.

While he's not my cup of tea politically I was interested in hearing his Lordship's take on what the pub trade needed to do to improve its image. After all, this is the man who PR'd Margaret Thatcher throught her 'golden years'. If anyone could hand over some pointers, surely it was he?

Sadly I was to be disappointed. Speaking without any notes he admitted he didn't have any pearls of wisdom for the trade, joking that if anyone wanted to switch their mobiles back on and take calls while he was talking he would understand perfectly. He even said he didn't know why he sat in the House of Lords, musing that it might be "because I was so nice to Margaret for 13 years".

Aside from a call for pubs to be a sort of community centre and offer services beyond the retail of alcohol he didn't have much to say about the sector, or how it can improve its standing both with Parliamentarians and the wider public.

Given that the man told us he had recently been asked to help Toyota help restore its reputation in the US after the 'sticking accelerator' affair I'd have thought advice for British boozers would have been a doddle. But despite some highly entertaining anecdotes there was no talk of how the sector could present a united front to MPs or mount a campaign to promote pubs to the general public, or improve its lot generally.

Instead there was a call for people running pubs to 'sort yourselves out'. Don't moan about your lot; do something about it instead, was the libertarian tenet of his argument. What individual pub operators, with all the issues they face, were supposed to do was not made clear.

He is an entertaining speaker however, especially if your bag is jokes about the French, the Japanese, and a million gypsies arriving outside the Pearly Gates and then nicking them when St Peter isn't looking. Imagine the Duke of Edinburgh doing stand-up comedy and you're there.

But crap jokes about foreigners aside, when it came to politics Bell didn't seem to have much time for anyone in Westminster today, particularly Gordon Brown, whom he described as "mad" and whose government had been a "disaster". But he couldn't get excited about David Cameron either, it seemed.

Change was inevitable, he argued, but not because the alternative was staggeringly good. "Blair got into power in 1997 because the country had had five years of John Major, who'd a majority of 26 in the House of Commons and did nothing with it," Bell said. In other words, change was what people were after now and change, he argued, was coming.

There are remarkable similarities between 1997 and today's political landscape - a long-in-the-tooth, discredited government and an unpopular Prime Minister - with one major exception; whoever takes over from Brown won't have what he himself inherited as Chancellor of the Exchequer 13 years ago: a decent economy.

Bell argued that Britain should have a dose of what he called "nasty government" to clear up the mess caused by Gordon Brown's lot. The mind boggled as to what this might entail, although he refrained from outlining his political vision, which on reflection was probably no bad thing…